Microsoft Now has a Serious Customer Service Offering: Dynamics 365 for Customer Service

Here's an overview of Microsoft's latest customer service offering: Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It can be deployed in-house or in the cloud. It is only appropriate for enterprise accounts and large non-profits. Microsoft does not yet offer a competitive SMB offering for customer service.

Customer Service for Small to Midsize Organizations

Desk.com is Salesforce.com's cloud-based customer service offering for very small to medium-sized businesses. Its strengths include case management and reporting capabilities, as well as channel and mobile device support. Desk.com’s knowledge model and knowledge management services support multiple languages very well.

Case Management, Knowledge Management, and Social Customer Service for SMBs

Freshdesk packages attractive and high value cross-channel case management, knowledge management, social customer service, and chat capabilities suitable for small, mid-sized, and large organizations. It competes with Zendesk and with Salesforce.com's Desk.com.

Virtual Assistants that Deliver Answers and Perform Actions

Nina Mobile and Nina Web, the virtual assistant offerings from Nuance, can deliver personalized answers to customers’ questions and perform actions for individual customers in speech or text in 43 languages on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. This 46-page report evaluates Nina against our Evaluation Framework for Customer Service Software,

Virtual Assistants that Use Cognitive Technology to Think and Learn

How does IBM Watson Engagement Advisor stack up in providing virtual assisted-service across customer service channels? Its virtual assistants can answer many types of customers’ questions and, through usage, can learn to answer more of them.

Capabilities for Self-Service, Assisted-Service, and Social Customer Service

Salesforce Service Cloud provides a broad and deep collection of customer service capabilities across self-service, assisted-service, and social customer service channels, earning an excellent evaluation. Read the specifics in our 50-page evaluation.

Delivering Answers and Solutions; Creating and Resolving Cases

Use this new version of our Framework for Evaluating Customer Service Software Products to produce actionable evaluations, comparisons, and selection. It’s adaptable to every type of customer service application.

Customer Service for Small and Growing Businesses

Desk.com, from Salesforce.com, provides case, account, and knowledge management capabilities across assisted-service, self-service, and social customer service channels for very-small, small, and mid-sized businesses. Read our evaluation in this report.

Callback Technology Can Give Customers Back the Time They Spend Waiting to Talk to You

We all hate waiting on hold. With automated callback technology, we may never have to again! But you have to make sure that you manage your implementation well so customers are never stuck waiting for a call that never comes.

Social Customer Service with Powerful Monitoring and Filtering, Deep Analysis, and Alert-Driven Customer Interaction

Clarabridge Analyze and Clarabridge Act monitor and analyze customer conversations on internal and social channels and provide mechanisms to interact with customers. Filtering, analysis, and classification are the strengths. Read our in-depth evaluation.

Customers want access to their information from anywhere and from any device. The best way to provide that access is via the cloud. By 2015, we predict that customer clouds will abound. Will you be ready?